Eastwood: True Crime (1999)

The second of Clint Eastwood’s great crime procedurals of the late 90s and early 00s sees him as Steve Everett, a reporter for the Oakland Tribune, who’s called in to cover the execution of Frank Beachum (Isaiah Washington), a Death Row inmate on Alcatraz. The entire film is set over one day in San Francisco, as Everett starts to suspect that Beachum might be innocent, and tries to rope together the evidence to prove his hunch. Among other things, that makes for a wonderful evocation of the quotidian fuzz, clutter and texture of the city, as Everett moves from one source of information to another, while trying to spend quality time with his daughter and estranged wife. As the day’s action and ambience gradually gathers around the North Block on Alcatraz, the film takes on the vertiginous, spiralling momentum of some of the most memorable San Francisco films, as Eastwood adopts the most mobile camera he’s ever used, centrifuging the city around himself at an almost dizzying speed. At the same time, that makes his identity feel more elastic, provisional and comic than in nearly any of his other films – at times his dialogue is positively screwy, the closest he could ever come to fast-talking, while his office, headed by the irascible Alan Mann (James Woods), feels straight out of a 90s media sitcom. That’s not to say that it makes light of capital punishment – if anything, Eastwood’s procedural tendencies create a much more chilling, dystopian vision of execution – or “the procedure” as it tends to be euphemised – than a more sentimental approach, evoking the exquisite courtesy afforded to an inmate on their last day on Death Row with a synth-scored, futuristic surrealism worthy of Carpenter or Cronenberg. It all makes for a film made to be shown in cities where entertainment technologies have become omniscient, but communication technologies haven’t quite caught up – although Everett can pretty much watch the progression of the execution wherever he goes, on a vast swathe of entertainment platforms, he can never quite communicate his findings as instantaneously as he’d like. And it’s in that frenetic disparity that the film’s San Francisco almost comes into focus, as a panorama of communicative possibilities that are always just out of reach.

Eastwood: Blood Work (2002)

With the exception of Play Misty For Me, Blood Work is probably the closest Clint Eastwood has come to a slasher film, and it’s got a similarly bewildering, disorienting sense of space as his earliest masterpiece. In fact, given that Play Misty For Me was originally intended to be a serial killer film set in L.A., Blood Work perhaps makes most sense as the first great film Eastwood never made, creating quite a melancholy, elegaic tone – Eastwood plays Michael Connelly’s popular FBI agent Terry McCaleb, who, at the end of his novel cycle, ends up committing suicide. In this part of the story, though, he’s recently retired, having suffered a heart attack (and received a heart transplant) while pursuing a hooded serial killer. Coincidentally, the heart donor turns out to have been one of the killer’s other victims, prompting a Terry to start investigating the case on his own time, with the help of the victim’s sister (Wanda de Jesus) and despite warnings from his physician (Anjelica Huston). Most of the film that follows plays out as a procedural, as Terry cruises an increasingly porous, amorphous Los Angeles, equally accessible from the air and from the ground, in search of a vanishing-point or sightline that always seems to be missing. As the camera responds in turn, riding great gusts of air in an effort to keep up with the mobile, shifting, distributed presence of the serial killer, it feels as if Eastwood’s managed to position the whole procedural at the thermocline where sea breezes and desert breezes meet – Terry’s retired to a marina on the edges of the city, while the investigation tends to take him to the fringes of the desert (which often feels like Nevada or New Mexico more than outer Los Angeles), creating sharp, shuddering changes in temperature and air pressure, moments of geophysical glitch that precipitate Terry’s perennial heart palpitations, his sense of how viscerally and physiologically he’s locked into the city and its stories. Given that the killer tends to communicate with Terry through shaky, handheld footage of his victims, Los Angeles is eventually more or less condensed to a marina on the edge of the desert with a whole lot of elasticised, digital glitch in between, as Terry drives himself to the point of death by investigating the crime that kept him alive, in an odd, middle ground between 90s slasher horror and 00s digital horror, fascinating as it is surprising to find in Eastwood’s late filmography. 

Eastwood: Absolute Power (1997)

Based on David Baldacci’s bestselling novel, Absolute Power sees Clint Eastwood as Luther Whitney, a jewel thief who witnesses the President (Gene Hackman) commit a murder while robbing a house. Things quickly spiral out of control, as Luther finds himself suspected of the crime, while simultaneously trying to find a way to incriminate the President, in what occasionally plays as a kind of Republican cautionary tale about Clinton – in many ways, what’s most shocking about the President is his sexual licentiousness, which is what precipitates the murder in the first place, propelling him and his Chief of Staff to the Watergate Hotel to bunker down and think through their options. While they’re thinking, Luther prepares his own case against them, which he does in much the same way as preparing for his heists – by casing every space that’s likely to incriminate them, or likely to incriminate him in the process. As a result, every space in the film brims with life, even or especially the most transitory establishing shots – at times it feels like a film composed of establishing shots – as Luther sets to studying architectural plans, contractor information, security data and whatever else he can get his hands on to facilitate a full-scale assault on the President’s most sacrosanct spaces. That makes for perhaps Eastwood’s most ethereal performance, dissolving him into his interiors more than any of his other films, as he gradually disperses into an American institution, a genius loci, something you inhabit more than someone you watch. That might sound grandiose, but it’s  accompanied by such a self-effacing performance – he barely speaks ten words in the first thirty minutes – and couched in such a modest genre exercise that it feels more like a turning-point towards his late work of the 90s and 00s, especially his movement away from appearing in his own films. By the end, his stare has become so pregnant and prehensile that it feels as if watching something, under the wrong conditions, can be tantamount to stealing it, in a heist film made at the very cusp of a new age of film piracy. Perhaps that’s why Luther keeps most of the artworks he steals, rather than selling them – like the generation of downloaders just around the corner, he’s a collector more than a distributor, a descendent of the art professor of The Eiger Santion, making masterpieces over in his own image.

Eastwood: The Bridges Of Madison County (1995)

In his long and varied career, Clint Eastwood has only made one out-and-out romance, but anybody encountering Eastwood through it would assume that it was made by a master of romances, a director who had spent his whole career perfecting the genre. In large part, that’s because of how radically Eastwood makes over Robert James Waller’s novel in his own image – where Waller’s vision of the fleeting, three day romance between a National Geographic photographer (Eastwood) and an Iowa housewife (Meryl Streep) was florid and baroque, Eastwood’s prescient enough that he works best as a director of silence to cut down everything but the bare bones of the story, filling in the rest with texture. And it’s one of his most textural, ambient films – from the moment Robert Kincaid meets Roberta Johnson, they’re drawn into a three day conversation (there’s virtually nobody else in the film) that’s confined to a few rooms in Roberta’s house, and the covered bridges that have brought Robert to the area. As the conversations become more sensual and intimate, they’re punctuated by longer and longer silences – silences that enliven Robert and Roberta, as well as the audience, to the vast ambient minutiae that surround them, in Eastwood’s most fully formed and elusive soundscape. At its strongest, it feels as if Eastwood has actually managed to fuse directing and deep listening, shooting Streep as if he were attending to her face as minutely as possible, in a kind of forerunner to the deep storytelling in Million Dollar Baby, the only other film of his that really approaches this level of hush. And that hush constellates around the bridges themselves, which tend to have more of a sonic than a visual presence, condensed to cool, dark recesses that leave nothing to do but listen, let the sound wash over you, as if their peculiar beauty was that, sonically at least, they managed to take you under their streams rather than across them. Ravishing in its melancholy, it’s hard to think of a better vehicle for Eastwood’s glassy brand of American romanticism than this lost love of a National Geographic photographer, as the film gathers all his elegaic lyricism into his gentlest performance, a beautifully orchestrated entry point into middle age. 

July: The Future (2011)

Miranda July’s second film is just as haunting and melancholy as her debut. Originally titled Satisfaction, it’s about a couple in their mid-thirties – Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater) – who decide to cement their relationship by adopting a stray, injured kitten named Paw Paw, who narrates the film, and is voiced by July. They’re given one month to get their lives in order while Paw Paw is recovering at the vet, and it quickly comes to feel like the last month before the future arrives in its entirety, the last month in which the present and future are distinct from each other. Almost as soon as the film starts, the present and future start to fuse and petrify into something else, eventually splitting Sophie and Jason into the present future and the future present, as they embark upon a pair of diverging universes and timelines. That creates something of an apocalyptic atmosphere, the dissolution of time that signals the arrival of end time, but by taking end time as literally and matter-of-factly as possible, July creates quite an unusual apocalypse – this vision of L.A. just gets quieter and quieter, cuter and cuter, like a tablet that goes out of date the moment you start using it. Nowhere in July’s oeuvre is cuteness quite as disempowering as it is here – everyone and everything is too swathed in adoration and warmth, too connected to all the manifold presences stroking and petting our every move, to have any kind of autonomy. And as the apocalypse approaches, July imperceptibly morphs with all the tchotchkes littering her apartment, in a kind of becoming-doll that cries out for the poses, postures and blocking of performance art as much as cinema. From that perspective, it’s more like Paw Paw adopts Sophie and Jason than vice versa, perhaps explaining why it’s so difficult to figure out whether we’re seeing things from Paw Paw’s perspective or July’s. And the perspective of Paw Paw-July creates an L.A. ensemble drama that’s perhaps even more original than Me and You and Everyone We Know – in a world without a future, there’s simply no difference between incidental encounters and the relationships they might have become, or the allegories they might have told, literalising the most amorphous of American cities into a sprawl of permanent moments.